Underlying Principles

Several principles are foundational to all my work. First, is that participants can and must be empowered to make informed decisions for themselves. I do not offer simple answers. However, I help people learn to raise key questions, examine their context systematically, draw upon their own knowledge and experience along with that of others, collaborate with colleagues and friends to take action, and assess the effectiveness of that action.

All my work draws upon extensive teaching experience, plus research at all grade levels. I often make use of the words of middle grades youth gathered from a project in which over 700 students wrote, “What is it like being a teen?”

Everything I do is highly active and interactive -- participants typically do as much or more talking than I, even in keynote addresses. And there is plenty of laughter throughout – anything worth taking seriously is worth laughing about!

Each of the following activities can be done in various formats:

1. Keynote addresses of 20 minutes to 2 hours.
2. Workshops of one hour to multiple days.
3. Ongoing consultation involving multiple meetings over days, weeks, months (by far, the best way to engender real, effective, lasting innovation [c.f., Deering, et al, 2003; Darling Hammond, 1997; Fullan, 1999].